What could have been if the Browns hadn't waited

The Cleveland Browns started Jameis Winston after Deshaun Watson's injury and immediately found offensive success that they hadn't seen all season.

Winston defeated the Baltimore Ravens 29-24 and threw for 343 yards and three touchdowns for the Browns, including a deep bomb to Cedric Tillman with less than a minute to play that put his team back on top.

Before Winston took the field for the Browns this week, the Browns ranked 30th in Expected Points Added (EPA) per game and dead last in winning percentage. In week 8? They jumped to 11th in EPA per game and 13th in success rate.

Was Winston perfect? No, he wasn't.

But even on drives that ended in punts, Winston was able to hang on a bit and give the defense a break. The game against the Washington Commanders and the Dallas Cowboys was lost primarily because the defense didn't have time to breathe due to constant mistakes on the offensive side of the ball.

This defense is good enough to carry the Browns through some offensive struggles, but not constant three-and-out games. Winston proved on Sunday that he can bring positives to the Browns.

He'll also give them negatives by losing a fumble in an avoidable area of ​​the field and throwing the ball up for grabs multiple times, but he'll also give the Browns something they haven't seen since the departure of Joe Flacco: explosive plays bottom field.

So that begs the question: If the Browns had changed sooner, where would their season be? At this point we're playing the hypothetical game, but if we're 2-6 on the season after beating the Ravens, what else do we have?

Four of the games the Browns lost were by one point, and in all of those games they had plenty of attacking opportunities to win the game. What if Winston had been the backup against the Cincinnati Bengals last week and not the third emergency quarterback?

Games like this against the New York Giants and Las Vegas Raiders and maybe even the Philadelphia Eagles have different results. With the offensive performance the Browns put together yesterday, volatile yet explosive, combined with their defense when given time to rest is a combination worth wondering about.

There's a real chance that this team would be 5-3 this season if Watson had been subbed at halftime of the Giants game. The worst-case scenario if you play out this hypothesis is that you end up at 4-4 in a fairly easy part of your schedule.

Instead, the Browns succumbed to the sunk cost fallacy and decided to go through with Watson even though his name was at the bottom of a handful of metrics evaluating quarterback play.

What could have been?

This article originally appeared on Browns Wire: What Could Have Been If the Browns Hadn't Waited